Valve has confrimed the general availability of its first batch of Steam Machines and hardware accessories.

What will be the first living room targeted Linux gaming PC and unique controller will hit retail on 10th November this year.

The Steam Link Streaming box will be made available at that time. Valve says that a "limited quantity" of machines and accessories can be had from 16th October, as long as you commit to a pre-order.

Alienware and Syber has announced that it is signing up to the idea. The Alienware design is said to be powerful enough to run Steam's 'massive library' of over 1000 games at 1080p on your HDTV.

That is because it will have an Intel Core processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. That will start at $449.

Syber offers three different base machines ranging from $499 to $1419 taking you from 1080p gaming to 4K gaming. Syber's offerings are upgradable using standard off-the shelf PC parts including hardware such as the Nvidia GTX 980 graphics card.

Valve has promised that more Steam Machines are coming although we have hard false starts with Steam before, this time it does look serious.

The Steam Controller is up for pre-order at $39.99. and Valve's Steam Link box should arrive at the same time. This box allows you to play your Steam games on any TV in the house when connected to your home network.

The Steam Link is available on its own for $39.99 or bundled with a Steam Controller for $79.98

HTC has showcased its Re Vive VR glasses that they are bringing to market with Valve, the creator of Half Life and the steam game distribution. We knew that Valve has been working on a VR headset for a while, but we didn’t see them partnering with HTC.

We had a chance to talk to HTC and we learned a thing or two about the HTC Re Vive VR headset. Let's repeat a few known facts - the headset should launch before the end of the year, and the VR glasses will have to be wired to your PC.

The PC will have to be a high end setup, in the test rig there was a Geforce GTX 980 and we heard that it supports AMD Fiji VR GPU as well, and that some slower Nvidia GPUs from Maxwell generation should be able to run the setup, too. Of course, you should be able to use GM200 powered Titan X card for even better performance.

Two lasers that track your glasses and hand controllers will have to be in the final retail / etail product. We learned that both hand controllers and lasers can end up being wireless too. The laser base units will sit in two corners of your room and they will send data to your headset, in order to give them perfect positioning data. HTC claims that there are 70 sensors that they are using and that this is the key differentiator to other VR products.

HTC didn’t want to give away to too many details, but we can assume that you will have to charge your hand controllers while the glasses will get the power from the PC. We are not sure what happens to the belt present in the first prototype, but we can imagine it will become smaller in the final version.

Developers version should be ready this spring and HTC plans to launch an actual retail product before the end of the year. The SDK that you need in order to program for HTC Re Vive glasses is based on Steam VR, but they are probably using some bits from Nvidia and AMD too. You still need a high-end graphics card and a gaming system in order to drive the VR device.

We are convinced that the Re Vive won't come cheap, we think it might cost as much as a high-end graphics card, but this is something that HTC or Valve don’t want to comment at this time. The second batch of demos as well as HTC Vive Developer Edition should happen before summer time and shipping them before the holiday season, that's the best date we got.

Although the first batch of Steam Machines is expected in November, some manufacturers have already announced their own versions and Valve has now added a full list of Steam Machines, including specifications and prices, over at its Steam site.

The cheapest one is the iBuyPower SBX, which starts at US $459.99 and some Steam Machines are priced at US $4,999, like Falcon Northwest Tiki Steam Machine which goes from US $1,999.99 to US $4,999.99, or Origin's Omega Steam Machine starting at US $899.99 and going up to US $4,999.99.

There will obviously plenty of Steam Machines to choose from, including some coming from favorite retailers/e-tailers like Alternate and Scan Computers, as well as recognizable hardware manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte.

According to Valve's Steam Machine site, each Steam Machine will be running on Steam OS and ship with a Steam Controller.

Valve has officially revealed the final design of the Steam Controller, which will go on sale in November with a price tag of $49.99.

The picture of the Steam Controller final design has been posted over at Valve's official Steam site and while we already had a chance to see quite a few prototypes, we must say that the final version does look a whole lot better.

In addition to the official picture of the Steam Controller, Valve also released full details and specifications. The Steam Controller will have dual trackpads, as Valve calls them, and the earlier D-pad cluster has now been replaced with an analog thumbstick, something that those coming from Playstation and Xbox will certainly appreciate.

The Steam Controller also comes with dual-stage triggers, which Valve describes as triggers that can be used as digital, analog or both types of input at the same time. It also features "HD haptics" or force actuators on both sides of the controller which should "deliver precise, high fidelity vibrations measures in microseconds."

In case you missed it earlier, Valve's Steam Controller will officially be available in November for $49.99, alongside Valve's new Steam Machines and Steam Link streaming device.

Valve has developed its own Intel Vulkan GPU graphics driver for Linux that they intend to open-source.

The Vulkan API is still being argued about and will not be finalised until later this year, but Valve has been developing their own Intel GPU reference driver for Vulkan to help early adopters boot-strap their code.

During their presentation at GDC2015 Valve announced that its Intel Linux driver will be open-sourced, but they haven't provided a time-frame for doing so.

Valve also confirmed that the Source 2 Engine supports the alpha Vulkan API today and that Vulkan will be supported across the board on Steam Machines.

Intel graphics hardware might not be the sexiest, but there is a lot of it out there. It is also easy to target for an open-source driver given Intel's extensive hardware specifications / programming documentation.

A Vulkan Intel Linux graphics driver used by game developers sounds very promising for having good support for this new API and most likely high-performance was a priority in the development of this driver by Valve and likely their partners at LunarG.

We still hope that there is a chance that we can see the HTC Vive demo in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, but we have a slim chance, right next to hell freezing over.

A few distinguished colleagues that we ran into at the event were saying that Vive VR is the best Virtual Reality kit so far. These people tried Oculus in all iterations, Galaxy VR and everything else available, just like yours truly, and they didn’t feel dizzy after 15 minutes demo.

The folks from CNET and Android Central also liked it. CNET even thinks that Oculus should watch out and Phonedroid has a great video that tells a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5pt1PbcU4o

It turns out that editors who had a chance to see it, including our friends at Anandtech, could not see the hardware machine and what kind of GPU was being used. It was reported that there was a single GPU nothing too powerful like tipple SLI or Crossfire.

We can now confirm that the demo unit has Geforce GTX 980 graphics and we got the info form people close to the matter. It can run other GPUs, it can use AMD cards too, but the one at Barcelona demo just happened to use a Geforce GTX 980.

This is all you need, a single GPU. Some people expected that you need more than one GPU to run the demo. HTC didn’t let journalist take picture of the demo room or the demo system, just the glasses.

We already knew that Valve would share a few more details regarding its Steam Machines and Steam Controller at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015, and it appears that these will be available in November, alongside the new Valve streaming device, the Steam Link.

Valve is definitely serious about bringing gaming to the living room and while it will have some fierce competition from Nvidia's new Shield console, Valve's Steam Machines, at least some of them, pack quite a bit more punch and do not rely on cloud gaming for more demanding titles.

In addition to more details about Steam Machines and Steam Controller, Valve has also unveiled Steam Link, a streaming device that should connect multiple systems and be able to stream games from other devices at 1080p resolution at 60Hz and with low latency, as long as they are connected on the same network. According to the first pictures, Steam Link is a small box with HDMI, two USB ports and Ethernet port.

According to what has already been announced at GDC 2015, Valve plans to have both Steam Machines, the Steam Controller and the new Steam Link on retail/e-tail shelves by November, or just in time for the holiday shopping season.

The Steam Controller and the Steam Link will be priced at US $49.99 while Valve expects Steam Machines to start "at the same price point as game consoles," but also offer "higher performance."

HTC has just announced the One M9 smartphone, the HTC Grip smartband and a Valve cooperation on a device called Vive - a Virtual Reality headset.

The Virtual Reality headset was just presented at an event preceding the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, and we got a chance to see the first hands-on demo as well.

Valve and HTC Vive will launch before the end of the year, and demos are expected this spring. Valve will be showing the device off in San Francisco. HTC has shared very few details about the device and hardware spec, but we are sure that Valve will tell us more at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco.

We have heard that the glasses should have a 90 Hertz refresh rate that will apparently not going to get you sick. We have tried Oculus a few times and you do get to experience some motion sickness after a while, but Oculus works rather well, if you can stomach the relatively low resolution.

HTC Vive offers full 360-degree head tracking via 70 sensors that in the device. They will even let you interact with the environment, but we need more details about how this is going to work. The Vive should be light to wear and there should be some content coming from Alchemy games, HBO, Lions Gate, Taiwan National Palace Museum and Google. HTC also promises great sound with the glasses, so let's hope that the resolution will be good too.

The company didn’t say if you will need a PC, mobile phone or some other device to feed content to the glasses, but we should get more details about how they work fairly soon.

HTC promised to show the glasses at the Mobile World Congress and hopefully at local events in March and April, so we have a good chance of seeing and trying out the device. Valve will show the glasses in San Francisco at GDC, while HTC will announce more details about it at the dedicated Vive website.

While have heard a lot about Valve's Steam Machines project we still have not seen an official release, it appears that the company will once again show the latest prototypes during Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015.

According to a report from Polygon.com, Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that the company will showcase new Steam Machines prototypes at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 scheduled to start on March 2 in San Francisco. Valve has previously detailed a total of 13 partners which are part of the Steam Machines project, including the likes of Alienware, Zotac, CyberPowerPC, iBuyPower, Maingear.

For those who came in late, Valve's Steam Machines project is a device that will be based on a variety of hardware components, price range and run on Valve's own SteamOS operating system.

Valve has originally planned to released Steam Machines sometime last year, but company has decided to delay the release this year.

It will certainly be interesting to see the new Steam Machines prototypes and see if there are any new partners with new and interesting hardware combinations.